A very *boilky* Saturday morning to you, time for a quick Man City preview. Much like the Arsenal players after Napoli, I’ve had little time to recover from all the beer and the rum and the Knob Creek but I’ll do my best.
6 points and three places in the table separate the two teams and we know that they’ve been very good at home this season. They come into the game on the back of a confidence boosting European victory over Bayern Munich, we have to pick ourselves up after going down 2-0 to Napoli.
But as I mentioned yesterday, every time we’ve had a bad result this season we’ve followed it up with a good one, showing real character and hopefully that will be the same today. In terms of the team we’re waiting on a fitness test for Bacary Sagna which hopefully will be positive, although the fact he’s having to have the test suggests he’s not exactly 100%.
If he’s out then Carl Jenkinson will continue and I think that will inform the manager’s selection in the rest of the pitch. Even with Theo Walcott getting back to ‘full power’, the boss will probably be a bit reluctant to use him if Jenkinson is behind him, perhaps deploying Wilshere on the right hand side. All the same, I think we’ll see a couple of changes from the team which went to Naples.
Ramsey is a sure fire starter having been rested in midweek and overall we’re going to be hoping for a much improved performance than the one we saw on Wednesday night. It’s not been the way of this Arsenal team to dominate games from start to finish this season, and I certainly don’t think we can expect to do that against a team as good as City, but the manager says that we need to be switched on a put in a good performance defensively.
In typical Arsene style, he reckons the best way to do that is attack:
We need a strong defensive performance and maybe the best way to do that is to attack, for us to have the ball and not allow them to have their flow. We like to score goals, we like to go forward, but City can do that as well. Pellegrini is an offensive manager, I am as well, so you should see interesting things on the offensive level.
Level 42, that was an offensive level, but it could well be quite an interesting game from an attacking point of view. It’s certainly where City are strongest although with Vincent Kompany back they’re not as iffy at the back as they were. And when you look at an Arsenal with the likes of Ozil, Giroud, Cazorla, Ramsey etc, we’ve certainly got plenty that can cause them problems.
It’s also interesting to see how Arsenal will approach a game that isn’t a must-win. A draw would be a decent result for us under the circumstances, but given how the midweek permutations affected our performance, with Per Mertesacker saying the team were 10% off their best, you have to hope they’ve got this one figured out. I think we’ll go there to try and win it.
Despite City’s forward prowess, I don’t think we’ve got any reason to be afraid of them. We drew there last season and since their emergence as a top four club the games have, generally speaking, been pretty tight. It will require us to do a lot better than we did in Italy though, but you get the impression that domestically the Arsenal players are well aware of what’s necessary this season.
Provided we don’t make mistakes at the back we’re defensively capable of making life difficult for them, and up the other end there’s enough talent, along with the rather handy ability of Mesut Ozil to make an impact at any time, to score goals. It’ll be tough but I think we can get a result today.
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In other news, the club have announced a 3% rise in ticket prices for next season. Personally, I find it difficult to pass comment on this as I’m not a season ticket holder, but they’ll point to ‘inflation’ and a £42.5m purchase which has to come from somewhere (cash reserves, I know). While those opposed to the increase will look at the rest of those cash reserves, increased commercial income from Emirates and a new kit deal to be announced, plus a massive new TV deal which is due to kick in, and suggest that the income from those sources would prevent fans being squeezed even further.
You also have to question the necessity of it when it’s clear than there are still swathes of empty seats for every game this season. The team has improved, the football is better, we’ve got a bums on seats signing and we’re top of the league, so why don’t we have a full house week in, week out?
Perhaps the club will point to ‘tickets sold’ as justification, but people have eyes, and increasing prices further isn’t going to help matters at all. Also, releasing the news late on a Friday afternoon reminded me of the kind of thing governments do – dish out bad news at a time when everyone’s gone to pub and with a game the next morning there’s little time to analyse it.
Ugh.
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Back to today, and as usual we’ll have full live blog coverage of the game for you. Check back later for a post with all the details, or simply bookmark our default live blog page and updates will begin automatically.
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Right, time for some breakfast, a walk with the Arseblog BFGerman Shepherd, then the match.
Come on you reds.
